Symbiotic fungi alter plant chemistry that discourages leaf‐cutting ants

Symbiotic fungi alter plant chemistry that discourages leaf-cutting ants.

Fungal symbionts that live asymptomatically inside plant tissues (endophytes) can influence plant-insect interactions. Recent work has shown that damage by leaf-cutting ants, a major Neotropical defoliator, is reduced to almost half in plants with high densities of endophytes. We investigated changes in the phenotype of leaves that could influence ants' behavior to result in the reduction of fo...

Endophytic fungi increase the processing rate of leaves by leafcutting ants (Atta)

1. Fungal endophytes are microfungi that reside asymptomatically inside of leaf tissues, increasing in density and diversity through time after leaves flush. Previous studies have suggested that the presence of fungal endophytes in the harvest material of leaf-cutting ants (Atta colombica, Guérin-Méneville) may negatively affect the ants and their fungal cultivar. 2. In the present study, it wa...

Plant-ants use symbiotic fungi as a food source: new insight into the nutritional ecology of ant-plant interactions.

Usually studied as pairwise interactions, mutualisms often involve networks of interacting species. Numerous tropical arboreal ants are specialist inhabitants of myrmecophytes (plants bearing domatia, i.e. hollow structures specialized to host ants) and are thought to rely almost exclusively on resources derived from the host plant. Recent studies, following up on century-old reports, have show...

Partial incompatibility between ants and symbiotic fungi in two sympatric species of Acromyrmex leaf-cutting ants.

We investigate the nature and duration of incompatibility between certain combinations of Acromyrmex leaf-cutting ants and symbiotic fungi, taken from sympatric colonies of the same or a related species. Ant-fungus incompatibility appeared to be largely independent of the ant species involved, but could be explained partly by genetic differences among the fungus cultivars. Following current the...

Genome Evolution in Plant Pathogenic and Symbiotic Fungi